PayPal is a popular and reliable online service for transferring money, purchasing goods, accepting payments globally with ease. PayPal connects securely with Bank accounts and credit cards for seamless integration of its services. But wherever there is money involved, some crime is expected to develop seeking to grab that money by unauthorized means. I recently got an email, which was a phishing email, which appeared to be from PayPal with a subject line “Action Required: Account Verification !!”

The phishing email I received was actually a part of some cyber-fraud and not from PayPal. In fact, it came to an email ID (which I user for official communication only) which does not have any PayPal account linked to it. So it raised my suspicion further. On close examination of the email, I understood that it was a phishing email sent with an intention to steal my PayPal login id and password. Let me explain how I identified this email was fake and how to be safe from such fraud and phishing emails.

First of all, the email was sent to an email id which I don’t use with PayPal, which may or may not be the case with others. So be very careful about it.

Secondly do carefully check from which servers this email was sent, for example, the servers used to sent the phishing email were like: az0033.srv.az.pl etc. which seemed like something suspicious.

Below is a snapshot of the email addresses used in official emails from PayPal which users servers named apac.e.paypal.com etc. which is much more clear and easy to identify as official. But beware, there are also techniques to forge the official email addresses as well, so read on for further details.

Below is the email content with a link which was given to take me to a PayPal look-alike login page to fool me by making me believe that its genuine. If I would have fallen for their trick, it would have leaked my PayPal credentials to cyber criminals / hackers.

What caught my attention was the link which they shared ended with some suspicious revenex media domain which is the address of some hackers group, so I decided not to click on it. I tested this page in incognito mode to check it where it leads me, but it showed me some DNS errors probably because the page was taken down or something like that. So next time you get an email from your PayPal or Bank or any financial institution urging you to login for some reason, don’t panic and take a minute to read the email sender’s address, read the content and link carefully before clicking on any link inside the email and also, for your safety, open a new browser window and type in the bank or PayPal address manually to login into your account as this will ensure that there is no masked hyperlink misleading you to some phishing page.